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Monday, December 10, 2012

Nexus 4 help online retracts USB peripherals support

We’ve been keeping readers informed about all the developments with the Google Nexus 4 phone, made by LG. This is a phenomenally hot smartphone at the moment and is still extremely hard to get hold of with well-documented news of demand far outstripping supply. Today we have some other news about the Nexus 4 as it seems that although it was originally marketed as a phone with OTG (USB) compatibility, that detail has now been retracted from the online help manual.

The Nexus 4 online help manual previously referred to USB and said that an adapter may be needed to connect peripherals such as a mouse or keyboard. However that has now been removed completely and instead it now says that such peripherals can be connected via Bluetooth and adds, “USB is not supported for connecting such devices.” Although some users may not be bothered by this at all, this will affect USB On The Go (OTG) and some who purchased the phone thinking it could power USB OTG devices may feel understandably let down by this mis-information.

About the only criticism of the Nexus 4 when it was first detailed was that it only came with 8 or 16GB of internal storage and this was non-expandable. However some may have thought they could get round this problem by using USB flash drives as a supplement and this option will now be denied to them. Android Central does point out though that this doesn’t necessarily mean that USB OTG support is ruled out completely as there is a fine balance between hardware and software to enable this function.

Apparently the non-support at the moment could be down to a software issue that could yet be adjusted. If the lack of support for USB OTG is purely down to hardware though then that’s an issue that would be much harder to overcome. It certainly doesn’t look as though Google planned this lack of support as other Nexus devices have it. Google has been asked to respond to this change in the online help manual and will hopefully respond soon with some more concrete information on this. In the meantime you may be interested in our previous article about how to optimize the battery performance of your Nexus 4 here.

We’d like to know your thoughts on this. If you have already purchased or ordered the Nexus 4 do you feel let down that the phone does not have USB OTG support? Did the fact that you thought it did have this support play any part in your decision to purchase the Nexus 4 or are you not worried about this omission? Let us have your comments.